The use of ominous thick black borders and orange graphics suggests Halloween, a look that could get old by March. This is the first screen you see, and it's for the overall Norton protection status, not specifically Norton AntiVirus. For that, you need to click a tab. Unlike Kaspersky and other antivirus applications, you can't change the look and feel of Norton AntiVirus The unfriendly look and feel is, perhaps, a deeper metaphor for the overall lack of the configuration settings within Norton AntiVirus LiveUpdate, which used to be a separate process, is now integrated into Norton AntiVirus and about time.
Once the product is installed and you're asked to update, everything--program files and signature files--arrive on your desktop together, making the experience smoother and easier. Symantec says this year's LiveUpdate packets are more compressed. By clicking on any of the blue, underlined items commonly thought of in HTML terms as links to other content , we get a pop-up message telling us what we already know.
If we hit Ignore to say close the pop-up, the feature is disabled. Somewhere, someone must have though this user interface made sense--it doesn't. Symantec limits if not removes a user's ability to customize and tweak individual settings throughout Norton AntiVirus ; for example, there's no quick way to set Norton to only scan new or recently modified files.
Our central problem is that Norton offers some wonderful features, but we have no way of tweaking any of them. Here, using the noncontextual Help file, we tried to learn more about the new feature "Browser Defender. It would be nice if Symantec provided contextual help i. Then there's my favorite configuration option "Turn on Advanced Mode" under the Suspicious Activity Monitor--it's not on by default, so should we turn it on? After checking the non-contextual Help file we learned the only difference between regular and Advance Mode is that the Suspicious Activity Monitor will log it in regular and alert you in Advanced mode.
But we had to search hard to find this information. Like last year, Symantec's support options include an automatic diagnostic tool for the program. It's worth noting that one of the comments it made is: "Your computer runs slowly after installing Norton AntiVirus ," which leads us to believe that many people experience this condition.
After an absence of one or two years, advertising once again creeps back into the Symantec's technical support section in the guise of "Expert Services" and "PC Tune Up. In the PC Tune Up scenario, you call up, are charged, and a Symantec technician remotely accesses your PC to resolve any problems you might be having at that time. During the freeze events, our Windows Task Manager revealed that aupdate. After waiting a few minutes--assuming the update would complete on its own--we were still unable to use the desktop and, worse, were unable to shut down the system without a hard reboot.
Symantec says they haven't heard any consumer complaints like ours. Should you decide to uninstall Norton Internet Security , there is an uninstall option on the All Programs listing, but we found it wasn't perfect. In other words, it won't necessarily remove all traces of Norton Internet Security from your PC.
To do so, says Symantec, you will need to use the Norton Removal Tool. In the end, however, ever after using both the uninstall application and the Norton Removal Tool, we still found registry keys and program file folders on our test machine. These we had to remove manually before installing our next text Internet Security package. Unlike with Kaspersky, you can't change the look and feel of Norton Internet Security Unlike McAfee Internet Security , Norton's interface isn't very intuitive or pleasing to the eye.
Our central problem is that while Norton Internet Security offers some useful features, we had no way of tweaking or learning more about any of the features. Drilling down into the configuration settings, we see "Turn on Suspicious Activity Monitoring" or "Turn on Bloodhound heuristics"--but do we really need these features? Symantec provides us with very little additional information for example, the built-in Help file says only "Turn on Bloodhound heuristics," not what it does , continuing with a practice adopted long ago by Symantec of making decisions for the user rather than presenting the user with options.
Then there's my favorite "Turn on Advanced Mode" under the Suspicious Activity Monitor--it's not on by default, so should we turn it on? Apparently the only difference between regular and Advance Mode is that the Suspicious Activity Monitor will log it in regular and alert you in Advanced mode. Again, you have to accept that Norton has your best interests in mind. The difference between these products is that Kaspersky offers a thorough PDF user's manual explaining your choices.
Norton does not. Nor can you truly customize these in any meaningful way, with few options to provide unique rules. Symantec limits if not removes a user's ability to customize and tweak individual settings throughout Norton Internet Security ; for example, there's no quick way to set Norton to only scan new or recently modified files. We're also not keen on Symantec's use of a large yellow block in the task tray that says Norton all the time.
While other vendors have discrete icons, even icons that rotate or blink, we found the constant advertisement in the lower-right-hand corner visually distracting and unnecessary.
Norton Internet Security 's pop-up alerts were no bigger or smaller than its competitors. Additional features include wireless protection and transaction security. For the Norton version of these, you'll have to purchase additional Symantec products. Within Norton Internet Security, we really didn't like the antiphishing feature.
It's not that it doesn't work--the antiphishing feature within Norton Internet Security works very well. It's when you turn it off as we did from time to time during our testing , that we found it's harder to turn back on than other antiphishing tools on the market today.
And, more ominously, without Norton antiphishing turned on, Norton Transaction Security features remain active, allowing us to provide personal information to various phishing sites. When we turned off antiphishing protection within the Norton Internet Security , a dialog box stated that the feature will be enabled again after 15 minutes. However, the fine print is that while Norton Internet Security re-enables the antiphishing feature 15 minutes later, your browser does not.
You have to restart the browser. Had we forgotten that 15 minutes was up, we might have merrily continued to surf the Web without any antiphishing protection.
McAfee's SiteAdvisor allows you to enable and disable the feature within the browser, avoiding this problem entirely. While Norton Phishing Protection was turned off, we further discovered another, more serious scenario. When Norton Phishing Protection is turned off, the Identity Safe feature remains enabled--in fact, we couldn't figure out how to disable Identity Safe apparently there's no configuration option for it. Shortly after disabling Norton Phishing Protection, we accessed a fraudulent banking site.
Norton, perhaps seeing that it was a banking site, asked if we wanted to use the ID card's personal information to populate the Web form on the page. Suppose we were sleepy; supplying the password would be a mindless click.
Suddenly our phishing site is filled in with our personal information. When we contacted Symantec about this issue, we received the e-mail response: "Although we strongly recommend that our customers use the Phishing Protection and Identity Safe features together, we don't penalize users who prefer not to use our toolbar by preventing them from using Identity Safe.
Again, we recommend that our customers use the features together, but we won't limit their choice of toolbars by penalizing customers if they don't use ours. Apparently, that's not a problem for Symantec. Another feature that's important today keeps malware sent via IM from infecting your PC. Norton Internet Security does that, but only if you have Microsoft 6. To test this, we installed Yahoo Instant Messenger 8. Given that both AOL and Yahoo have suffered large-scale attacks in recent months, it's odd that Norton doesn't yet support the latest versions of these.
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